The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “It would, so to speak, solve their problem.”

  “Probably. But create others. This Cretus is an upsetter, and I want none of it; we have learned to do without them. I agree; Cretus must not be permitted to leave this earth; yet there are secrets we’d have of him before it comes to that, isn’t it so?”

  Clellendol turned his face, so that there would be no gesture accompanying the words, an innately Ler mannerism,67 but his agreement was spoken: “Zha’ armeshero,” which was an affirmative that left little doubt, if any.68 Clellendol would array against Cretus all that he possessed of the Ninth House of Thieves.

  Now the great burden of Cretus pressed down heavily upon Meure, so that there was a darkness and a weight behind his eyes; and Cretus, who saw all things through the eyes and nerves of Meure, also felt these things and felt in his heart a kindliness, an affection, for one who had been given a burden unasked and undeserved, but yet bore it as bravely as he could according to his lights. And, bodiless invader though he was, Cretus contrived a way to speak more directly with him who bore him, as though they were separate.

  This speech, if speech it could be called, passed faster than could be done with words, for it was made of raw thoughts, as were in men’s minds before they invented words to symbolize and transmit them. Yet it was speechlike, in that it was directed thought, consciously shaped, not merely unedited and uncontrolled mind-stuff. And there was much that Cretus did not say.

  Of the many griefs of the Klesh he spoke in summary, but did not dwell upon those things; likewise he spoke of the brutal weeding which had made the original Klesh pure racial types in the beginning. And of the time before that, when the pre-Klesh had been just orindary Humans, men and women, the Klesh only said, “That is now forgotten and unknown, since we cannot reach it—the Time Before the Beginning. Of that we know not, therefore we care not.”

  And when they had been freed of the Warriors, awaiting the great ships that would take them from the planet Dawn to some new home far away in the stars, they gathered, in their many shapes and colors, and said among one another, “We were slaves without hope of salvation, since we were slaves for the sake of slavery, not even for a real purpose, however shabby. Freedom, we had ceased to dream of it. Now, we are free, and though we were made pureblooded through no will of our own, pure we are, and pure we remain, and pure we shall remain by our own hands, for it was the mixed men who were weak and allowed the corrupt Warriors to enslave them and mold their forms like wax. Thus they set chains on them. Thereby let each cleave to his and her own kind; let it be so until the end of time!” And it was so. And they then all spoke strong and blood-curdling oaths that never again, whatever befell them, would any Klesh, even the least as the strongest, endure what had befallen them in the pits of the Warriors.

  They were taken to the planet the Mixed men called Monsalvat. And they also learned to call it Aceldama, a place to bury strangers, learning that word from the awed and incredulous administrators who came to guide them, meaning well, no doubt, but failing as quickly as those who might have meant evil. There, some flourished, even as others weakened, faded, and their lines failed and their lights went out and they were no more. Most of all they needed, and longed for, stern teachers of men; but the Ler feared them, thinking of the Warriors, no doubt, and of optative revenges by the Klesh. And just so the men, who were from the stars, feared them, seeing their tumults and the strife, and so both drew back, missing much, and thereby withdrew altogether. And so abandoned, the Klesh made do, and settled down to the long night.

  In which, they suspected, they were not alone. Monsalvat was an old world; of that there was no lack of ample geological evidence, as discovered by the star-men, and the Klesh saw no reason to doubt their conclusions, for they flew through space, did they not? But nowhere were artifacts found, no ruins, nor any trace of any kind that speaking creatures had ever walked its surface. Here was an ideal planet, and one that echoed to the boundless silences of time throughout the ages, its native life forms few and bearing no trace of evolutionary relationship to one another. A world so old that the first explorers said that Monsalvat had known flowering plants before there was a Solar System. And there was no one.

  But there was something to the clarity of the air, ripples just below the threshold of perception, motions seen out of the corners of one’s eyes, lights in the forest, and the undoubted success of fortune-tellers and omen-readers. Here, the oracle spoke. And there was a brooding presence that could not be denied, even though the form it took could neither be defined nor perceived, a something older than the darkness, older than man, perhaps older than time itself . . . It seemed not to notice them that they could tell, and they hoped not to notice it, or them. And for a time, one could forget it, but always, in the back of the mind, there never failed the suspicion that one was being watched, and always the sensation was strongest at the most intense moments; so that in the midst of a great battle, when the horns called and the swords struck fire against their cutting edges, so it was that the heroes always paused, at the last moment before the battle-lust took them, and saluted, with their raised weapons, to the one unseen who was not to be named, and then fell to their deadly work.

  Now in the beginning, the Klesh perceived that the type called Zlat could see farther than any of them, and they accorded them special place on Monsalvat; the advisers and counselors of chiefs and princes they became. But their service quickly separated them from one another, and their confidants cared little for the maintenance of any tribe save their own, so that in the course of their service, the Zlats faded slowly as a race, having to undertake long and perilous journeys for a bride or husband. Many had no descendant, and others mingled with other Klesh types, so that in the end they faded, and vanished. That some in that end stooped to evil deeds and false counsel cannot be denied, but however it was, they passed from the world, and were forgotten, with their secrets. Save in a few forgotten places, the Zlat Rada was gone.

  Those few pockets lingered on a little longer, but in time, they too became single wanderers, itinerant fortune-tellers and omen-readers, and so mixed with half-breeds, renegades and worse, and so ended their line.

  A generation after the end that was thought, there was born a boy, who by his marks was pure Zlat. His life was a chancy one, and soon he was orphaned by the incessant wars and mayhems of Monsalvat; he was eventually taken in by an old woman who claimed to be also a Zlat, and who possessed the artifact which lent them their far-sight, the Skazenach, the wire tangle through which the user could see places and times distant from himself, seemingly in the guise of stories and epics told on the settings of the Skazenach69 made by an ancient tradition.

  The old woman took the boy to the fens of Yast, in the far delta of the great river of Kepture, where they made a living smoking meats, and the old woman cast fortunes for the nomads who came down from the heights of Ombur. Originally, the boy was sickly, and good for little in the camps of the nomads save for fetching water, and so he came to be called, in the common speech of those parts, Sano Hanzlator, which is bad Singlespeech, but which means, more or less, “Waterboy Last-Zlat.”70

  In time, the old woman’s time came, and she died, having instructed him in the ways of the Skazenach; and she taught him in secret, and swore him to secrecy also, for the Skazenach was the most powerful of all oracles, and the possessor of one would be hounded for reading until he had no life left of his own, whatsoever.

  Now the boy was grown almost to manhood, and the sickliness had been replaced by a grim wiriness. He left the delta camps of the nomads, and drifted north, to the great city Yastian, a city grown exceedingly large, a vast mixing-pot where all breeds met and mingled and detestation hung in the air, stronger in its reek than the odor of the swamps. There were bravoes and tarts, ruined beggars and kings, wise men and fools alike, the rich and the educated, the ignorant and the poor. There were also princes and fastidious clerks. Evil was done in the light as well as in the dark, and a single life
was worth less than nothing. But being a fetchboy for the fierce nomads, and the letters he had learned of the old woman, and his secret oracle, all stood him well there, and Sano became a scribe, transcribing petitions beside the palace wall.

  The boy Sano in the city survived and grew, even prospering after his own fashion, for he was wont to waste nothing and live frugally; and as he grew he came to understand many things from the life of the city in which he was immersed. He came to understand that the great secret, the only one worth knowing, was not that life consisted of haves and have-nots, but that it consisted of doers and seers, the rub being that the seers seemed unable to do, and the doers unable to see. That was the great secret and the division of men, Klesh not the less. And more he saw clearly: that the Klesh would never advance farther than they were at that moment, if they failed to learn that they must cooperate with one another, learn to complement one another, instead of endlessly striving to outdo one another; and that the pride of Rada that they took on so readily was but still another trap from which there was in the end no escape, since each remembered the crimes done to all, even to the whole of the past.

  Therefore in all his time, he studied, he dreamed, he planned. He looked within, through his Skazenach, many times and places, becoming skilled in aiming and directing his thought through the symbolisms of the device. And his aim became no less than to built the Klesh peoples into a great people, such as they could be, but not by mixing them, which they would never countenance, but by constructing a component system of interlocking dependencies, all respected, all needed.

  Now in Yastian the City there was a place somewhat below the palace where orators were wont to go and speak to the people, and to that place Sano went to deliver his message to whomever might give ear. When at last he had spoken, many of those there mocked him, saying, “Sano the Scribe will deliver us from ourselves. And even as now. “Whereupon he stepped down, saying, “Then I will be Waterboy Last-Zlat the Scribe no longer, but will come to you again as an avatar of Cretus, a fell hero of the old days71, but I will yet be a scribe until the last day.” The mob hooted, and tried to stone him, unsuccessfully.

  Sano, now Cretus, left the city of the delta and walked westward up into the land Ombur, where his words fell on sympathetic ears, but went, by and large, without action. So he crossed the great river Vast northward into Incana, where some listened, and acted, too. And first in Incana, it began to come together, not without strife, nor yet without war, but come it did, and soon all nations began to crumble before the newfound

  Now there is something which must be told, which is part of the story of Cretus the scribe as well (and it was along these lines that Meure felt most surely that Cretus was withholding something of it, not out of a desire for secrecy, but out of a requirement to protect Meure from something Cretus feared to face directly). From the beginning of his labors, which took in twenty of the years of Monsalvat, Cretus had been accustomed to consult his own oracle, and act thereupon, and it had not failed him, not once. But as Kepture neared complete assimilation, and the war at last neared its end, and even Yastian in its delta lands submitted, Cretus began to feel a subtle change in the oracle.

  And in the circumstances around him as well. The counselors and advisers and court flunkies were closing in; he knew this to be natural, and moved to counter this trend, following the correct course: and while it slowed the clotting of the great dynamic empire, it was only by a little. It was as if something offstage were purposely guiding all those people to a common end. And as he realized, or suspected this, he also saw that while they had indeed gained all Kepture, the remaining three continents were as far away as other planets, and getting no closer; and that the invasion of Chengurune had been postponed so long that by now they must be waiting on the beaches for them, to repulse the first overseas invasion in the history of the planet.

  There was more that disturbed him; his own oracle was becoming unreliable, unsteady, as if something was distorting it even as he worked it. The visions it provoked were unclear and vague, and he began to distrust them, for they always seemed to lead to the path of more war, and more blood, and even more strife. Then he used one of the ways of his people and consulted their oracle, and the oracle told him that within, as he knew the way, he would find rest, and be called again.

  —Is that all?

  —No, not all. Nothing is ever all of it. But mostly. Yet when I came again, it was to a world that had changed. Almost like another planet, but I knew that it was Monsalvat/Aceldama, and that a great, vast time had passed. The empire came and went, and left little enough behind it. But there was an equilibrium among the peoples, a quiet, as if my war had been the last great one. What was it like, all those centuries? Like a moment, in which I thought I felt some ripples, and then I was you.

  —You think transfer was tried other times?

  —Yes. But no one knows how we Klesh armor ourselves, save other Klesh. It wouldn’t take, because it couldn’t—we won’t accept transference, because we hate too strongly. We feel everything too strongly. So it brought a Mixed man from the stars to me so that . . .

  —So that you would stir things up again.

  —I’ll say it the old way: Tasi mapravemo zha’. Most correctly so. So that I would try to rebuild the Empire with strife where none is now; therefore I hide from it. In bringing me back, it has given a place to hide from it, where there was none before. But you are exposed, of course; I will help you as I may. (Here, the stream of onrushing thought paused for a second, as if considering something Meure could not see, or perhaps just wandering. He could not tell.) . . . yes. It wants strife, so much I know. I know well; I have looked through the Skazenach all the way back, to the beginning, and beyond it. Ha! Beyond the beginning, I say! I know the secret of the Ler, and what a joke it is; what fools they have been. St. Zermille, our Lady of Monsalvat, protector of the weak, defender of the defenseless, Sister of Mercy, on a planet whose people confuse the word justice with revenge, and forget the difference. But we knew all along, and they were the ones who were misled. And knowing that we were right on that one, I wonder how many other things about this place we’ve been right about? Yes, about that. I know it’s there. And yet, in a way I can’t tell you, it isn’t there . . . (And here, the thought almost faded out, as if Cretus was only musing to himself) . . . and the strife it wants I’ll bring to it, if I can find it before it finds me.

  —You keep saying “it”. . . .

  —I think that we are almost as hard for it to perceive as it is to us; but it can cause long-range events, large-current movements among the people. It can reach far, but it seems difficult for it to undertake fine detail work, except through the persuasions of the oracles it uses. . . .

  —It sounds almost like a God, but I. . . .

  —This isn’t religion we’re talking about . . . I’m not even sure it’s alive, in the sense we’d call something alive, like a person or an animal or a plant.

  —But you talk about it perceiving; that’s life, isn’t it? And it causing things to happen . . .

  —Many things perceive, and even regulations can cause things to happen. Your machines have will and awareness, some of them, but for all that they are not alive. At any rate, the last time I looked, they weren’t. The last time I looked . . . I looked across time and space to where a young man sat in a tower and wrote verses to the night. It doesn’t matter where it was . . . or when, relative to you and I and now on Monsalvat the cursed. This he said aloud, repeating it until it felt right to him, and some of his words were strange, but I understood and remembered: “Language is a chemical phenomenon, with atoms and molecules and complex superstructures, that, in a proper environment aided by proper stimuli, become replicating structures which lead to life-forms. Phonemes into words into ideas into chains of things. At the present, we who think are but in the bare-planet stage of life; the life-forms of the future are unknown to us who are to be their matrix, but in the future beautiful burning tigers will stalk
through the nighted forests of our minds.” What do you think of that, hah? That things can assume life within our very thoughts!? Then do not be so quick to draw the line between the living and the dead . . . There are life forms, and there are other life forms. Size and scale, rates of time vary, perceptions vary, I am Cretus, what you think is a barbarian, but I know that to a creature who sees with radio waves, men are invisible, ghosts who probably aren’t there. Yes?

  —You are a barbarian. Where did you learn these things?

  —I may be a barbarian, boy, but I was an emperor. An emperor can do what he damn well pleases: he can stupefy himself with drugs, he can wallow abed with the court whores. . . .

  —He can indulge in gluttony, which is the only sin.

  —Very perceptive, that! Take it further, now that you’ve said it! All valid thoughts are endless chains, but you must follow them out as far as you can; there lies mastery.

  —Drugs, women, drink, food: just refinements . . . That the medium changes does not change the nature of the act.

  —Keep going!

  —One in power practices other indulgences beside those of the senses . . . I see, it still remains the same: Some fondle the position, and others the work that maintains it. Still others concentrate on the manipulations of power, plots, strategies . . .

  —Possessions, routines, obedience, flattery. The list is virtually endless, without changing the nature of it. And the others expect it of you and press upon you to seek those indulgences. I sought ways to avoid those traps. So much is basically natural, a part of us. It was when I escaped those fates that the pressure became unnatural, and at that point I was sure that there was an exterior . . . something . . . manipulating the people around me. Not by individual control, but by a kind of bending of the behavioral space to steepen the natural impulse. It damn near revealed itself, but it realized that I could then see its traces and was closing on its actuality; then it became more concealed. Shortly thereafter, I saw that the end was at hand in that time. I took what it offered, as a truce, because I could do no more there . . .